Valve has confirmed to IGN that it will not be announcing any new projects at this year’s E3.

Previously, a great deal of speculation has surrounded the announcement of Half-Life 3, among other projects. The Half-Life franchise was last seen in 2007 with the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two in The Orange Box.

At the moment, Valve is working on Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, both of which are currently in closed beta. In addition, new Portal 2 DLC is set to arrive in the coming weeks.

Source: IGN UK

Lots of Steam on Linux news this week after Michael Larabel visited Valve office and confirmed Steam and Source Engine on Linux.

Now, in a Live QA session for Ubuntu 12.04 release, Ubuntu Developer and Community Manager Jono Bacon said that he knows Canonical has been in touch with Valve to ensure top notch support of Steam client on Ubuntu.

Check out the video, skip to 52:14 for Steam part:

Probably Canonical already had idea about Steam on Linux before Phoronix broke the news? Also, according to Michael Larabel, Ubuntu has worked out a gaming deal from a big publisher. These games may be available in Ubuntu Software Center later this year.

It seems, Canonical has plans to push Ubuntu as a gaming platform this year to increase mainstream adoption.

Source: Ubuntu Vibes

This one is interesting, Valve is trying to charge morons and jerks more for their games, nice people would pay less or play for free even.

In a podcast interview with Seven Day Cooldown, summarized by Develop, Valve Boss Gabe Newell discusses the payment model for upcoming strategy game DOTA 2.:

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?”

“…the games industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products".

“An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.” 

And the latest news is that they are going beyond this crazy idea into seeing what’s actually possible:

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.”

"It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

This sounds like a scary idea, what do you guys think? What if “nice people” would just resale Steam games to “trolls”? This just doesn’t look so great to me.

Source: /.

I can’t believe they finally did it. A lot of gamers were questioning why it wasn’t possible to access games in offline mode in Steam while an account was suspended or banned, but the real news is that you already can, Valve just never told anyone.

What’s more? Your games aren’t limited to offline mode.

While Valve doesn’t have a lot of legal lingo surrounding the use of their digital distribution service, they do make it known in the subscriber agreement consent form…

“Valve may terminate your Account or a particular Subscription for any conduct or activity that Valve believes is illegal, constitutes a Cheat, or which otherwise negatively affects the enjoyment of Steam by other Subscribers.”

One user put that clause to the test and was banned, however, he later found out that he wasn’t completely blocked out of accessing his games because of a recent policy update in Steam for account access, which has now been deemed as "account locking" instead of "account banning". According to a Steam volunteer moderator, he makes it clear that…

“Steam support stopped disabling Steam accounts a bit more than two months ago. This has been replaced with "account locking": you still have access to your games, but some restrictions are applied to your account (no trading, no cd key activation, no purchase allowed, etc.).”

He provides proof of this with screenshots of an account being banned but still having access to games in offline or online mode:

This means that gamers who have been banned either for fraudulent or nefarious purposes with the intent to use their Steam account for other activities other than gaming like an upstanding member of the interactive entertainment community, can still access the games they paid for.

There are simply restrictions added to the account but the content you paid for is content you still have access to.

Valve actually offers quite a bit of leeway in using their service, so getting banned is not something that’s particularly easy to do so long as you follow the rules. There are, however, some rare exceptions where tertiary license agreements are put into place for Steam games, particularly, EA’s games on Steam, where an EA EULA for a [now absent] product on Steam basically outlines the same sort of restrictions you would find on Origin. Of course, since it’s Steam, there’s no worries about "losing entitlements" or having third-party software scan your PC for you.

Valve’s head honcho, Gabe Newell, recently spoke out against these sort of practices that EA is using for Origin, saying that as the service stands right now it’s just not up to par to where it should be for consumers and gamers, and it’s just not doing anything super-well at the moment. It’s kind of hard to argue against that point.

At least gamers who went off the deep end and managed to get banned can still play their games and access the content on both Steam and Origin. So, in that regards, it’s a win-win situation for gamers no matter which digital distribution service you use.

However Steam’s official support representative has stated that:

“Games registered to suspended accounts will no longer be accessible; even in offline mode."

Of course, the support didn’t clarify if this applies retroactively for suspended accounts or the distinction between a suspended account or a locked account, so we’re awaiting official word from Valve on the matter.

Source: Cinemablend

“Gabe Newell denied meeting Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple in a recent podcast with Seven Day Cooldown, but that’s not all he said. He also mentioned that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play, but with a twist.

“It’s going to be free-to-play — it’ll have some twists, but that’s the easiest way for people to think about it,” he revealed.

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?,” he mentioned when asked about what kind of “twist ” players can expect from the game.

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated.

“We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would  be on the other side of the planet.

“It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people,” he added.

He said that the free-to-play model Valve has in mind for DOTA 2 is completely unique and hasn’t been done before.

“When you start thinking about the different games that people play and you try to think about how people can create value or a service in one game and benefit somebody in a different game, you can start to see how the different games sort knit together,” Newell said.

“[You can see] how somebody who really likes Team Fortress 2 (TF2) can still be creating value for somebody who is playing DOTA 2 or Skyrim, or if somebody is a creator in one space how it can translate into another.

“In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.”

Source: Gaming Bolt

It’s certainly an important time to admit such a thing, considering how Google’s Project Glass heads-up display generated so much interest last week, but Abrash cautions that you shouldn’t expect a product out of Valve anytime soon, if at all:

To be clear, this is R&D – it doesn’t in any way involve a product at this point, and won’t for a long while, if ever – so please, no rumors about Steam glasses being announced at E3. It’s an initial investigation into a very interesting and promising space, and falls more under the heading of research than development. The Valve approach is to do experiments and see what we learn – failure is fine, just so long as we can identify failure quickly, learn from it, and move on – and then apply it to the next experiment. The process is very fast-moving and iterative, and we’re just at the start. How far and where the investigation goes depends on what we learn.

The reveal is actually part of a long, fascinating blog post about how Abrash was first drawn to work at Valve, after years at Microsoft, Intel (on the canceled Larrabee graphics architecture) and id, where he coauthored Quake, not to mention how the intense freedom at Valve (and a love of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash) helped him start building the wearable computing R&D project in the first place. It’s hard to think of a better recruiting pitch, and he’s even asking for interested talent to shoot him an email. Head on over to our source link to take a look.”

Source: The Verge

YES! Finally Valve Software has decided that soon all Steam users will be able to sell or give away their own “used” games off their Steam accounts. Here is what Gabe Newell said:

“We are happy to announce that soon (May 1st) all Steam users who bought at least one game using Steam will be able to give away or resell their own Steam games to their friends. All of the funds gathered from their sales will either directly show on their credit card balance or Steam Wallet, so right now you don’t have to worry about buying a shitty game as you can simply sell it to someone else.” – Gabe Newell said.

Additionally Newell mentioned the new, improved refund policy:

“We really like how Google Play (former Android Market) handles refunds so we’re about to introduce a similar refund policy. You’ll have 12 hours to return any game whether you played it, liked it or hated it. Simple as that.”

Here are some leaked screenshots of the upcoming feature:

The idea, it seemed, was to take the console approach and provide a set list of hardware that developers could rely on from multiple manufacturers. There’s no indication that Valve was looking to create a single console to compete with the current and next-generation crops, but rather to have a standardized PC platform that lasts for up to four years at the most. There’s even talk that the Alienware X51 rig was built based on an early Steam Box spec.

According to a November 2 tweet by Valve employee Greg Coomer, a hand-built prototype consisted of a quad-core Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a Zotac Z68 mini-ITX motherboard with an on-board Nvidia mobile GPU. According to Zotac’s website, the Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme supports socket LGA1155 2nd generation Intel Core processors and features the Intel Z68 Express chipset, Nvidia’s GeForce GT 430 GPU with 1 GB of DDR3 VRAM, 802.11n and Ethernet connectivity and more.

Coomer said his prototype ran Portal 2 FAST.

Still, regardless what seems to be going on with Steam Box, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi claims the company is currently focused on prepping and shipping the Steam Big Picture Mode UI. He even admitted that Valve is building boxes to test the new Steam interface only. This new UI will reportedly make the online gaming service easier to use for people who want to play Steam games on a PC that’s connected to their TV.

“We’re also doing a bunch of different experiments with biometric feedback and stuff like that, which we’ve talked about a fair amount,” he admitted. “All of that is stuff that we’re working on, but it’s a long way from Valve shipping any sort of hardware.”

Yet hardware is not out of the question, as even Valve bossman Gabe Newell recently said that Valve will sell hardware if it becomes a necessity to keep the doors open.

On top of that, Lombardi didn’t actually refuse to say that Valve isn’t working on a hardware platform. Instead, he agreed that there’s definitely nothing coming any time soon, nothing at GDC or E3. Like Newell said, there’s a possibility that maybe some day Valve will make hardware, but Lombardi made it clear that (a) Valve partnering with hardware manufacturers and/or (b) Valve building its own hardware will not be happening anytime soon. End of story.

As for the prototype seen back in November, Lombardi said that Coomer is one of the guys leading the Big Picture effort. “The idea is that you can take Steam to any display,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is say, ‘here’s a box that we’re going to use for testing that’s common for Big Picture mode and get performance at a base level.’”

“We’re always putting boxes together,” he added. “Going all the way back to the Half-Life 1 days, we built special boxes to test our software render… it’s just part of development.”

Sound like he just nuked any speculation that Coomer’s rig was a Steam Box prototype

.

Source: Tom’s Hardware m.tomshardware.com/news/Valve-Steam-Box-Zotac-Alienware-Big-Picture,14959.html#xtor=RSS-993

In June of 2011, Valve Software took its four-year-old online first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 and made it completely free-to-play — and ended up increasing revenues by a factor of twelve as a result.

Valve’s Joe Ludwig ran a GDC session Wednesday that explained exactly how four years’ worth of content updates, tweaks, and community engagement helped Valve transition TF2 from a triple-A boxed title to a free-to-play game built around microtransactions.

Updates keep players hooked

Building large updates with additional content was key to maintaining player interest and expanding the player base.

"Although small updates to the game started immediately after launch, it wasn’t until the medic update in 2008 that significantly changed revenue," Ludwig said. "Adding so much stuff at once gave the press and community a reason to talk about it, which got more people to try it for the first time."

However, Valve soon found that the business model for a triple-A boxed game didn’t quite mesh with their development strategy.

"The trouble is, when you’re a AAA box game, the only people who can earn you new revenue are the people who haven’t bought your game. This drives you to build new content to attract new people," Ludwig said, "There’s a fundamental tension between building the game to satisfy existing players and attract new players."

In order to resolve this tension, Valve continued to release updates that delivered new maps, game modes, weapons, and even entire new game systems (in-game items, a marketplace, and a trading system, for example) with the eventual goal of switching over to free-to-play.

Community engagement key for maintaining player interest

In order to make a successful free-to-play game, Valve needed to make sure that its players were constantly coming back to Team Fortress 2 and checking back in. Part of its strategy entailed engaging its player community in as many different ways as possible.

Ludwig showed TF2′s Sniper-focused update as an example. Each content update started with a teaser trailer that hinted at several possible new items or features, and Valve developers would monitor the community reaction in the forums to determine which aspects caught the players’ attention. "We found people in the forums talking about how cool it would be if the Pyro could light the sniper’s arrows on fire. To be honest, we hadn’t considered it, but we were able to implement it by the time the update shipped," Ludwig said.

In another instance, players picked up on a blueprint displayed in passing within the teaser trailer for the Engineer-focused update of a mechanical hand item. Ludwig explained that "[The players] didn’t realize it, but they were indirectly voting on the content of the update. When the update shipped, it included that robot hand."

If Valve was going to engage its player community outside the game itself to try and maintain interest in TF2, it was going to have to do it well, Ludwig stressed. "It’s important to make the out-of-game components to the updates just as compelling as the in-game components. This is something that MMOs do really well. In our case, this means telling a story with multiple parts."

But the community relationship wasn’t limited to soliciting and monitoring feedback. Valve gave its players several opportunities to contribute to the game itself as well by designing game maps and proposing in-game items. "At this point, more than half of the items in TF2 are contributed by the community. Pretty much every place you give the community a chance to change the game, they’ll do it, and they’ll probably do a better job than you would," Ludwig said, "One more way that the community contributed to updates is by building maps. Up to this point we’ve shipped 19 community maps."

Anticipate negative player reactions and design around them

Once Valve rolled out the in-game item system, it needed to get the players used to the idea of paying for them. "This wasn’t a change we made lightly, but it was something we had to do to get our game into the free-to-play business model," Ludwig said.

"They had never paid for an item in TF2 at any point in the past, and we weren’t sure how willing they’d be to pay now."

Ludwig outlined the players’ possible objections to the item store, the first of which was TF2 turning into a "pay-to-win" game:

"We dealt with the pay to win concern in a few ways. The first was to make items involve tradeoffs, so there’s no clear winner between two items. But by far the biggest thing we did to change this perception was to make all the items that change the game free. You can get them from item drops, or from the crafting system. It might be a little easier to buy them in the store, but you can get them without paying. The only items we sell exclusive to the store are cosmetic or items optional to gameplay."

Players also hated the idea of getting nickel-and-dimed with intermediary virtual currencies, like a point system. "Players actually object pretty strongly to the idea that they’ll have to take their money and buy a block of some virtual currency, when they only want to spend a fraction of that on the item they want," Ludwig said, "TF2 uses the Steam Wallet, which supports all currencies you can normally use on Steam, and lets you load it to the exact amount you want to use. It’s now used by 22 games on Steam."

Valve’s audience concern extended into the actual free-to-play transition, as well; it needed to make sure that players who paid for the game didn’t feel ripped off. "One thing we did was to give paid players a hat called ‘Proof of Purchase’. We also made a distinction between paid and free accounts; smaller backpack sizes, and fewer crates. What we didn’t include was any restriction on how you could play the game itself," Ludwig said.

Fortunately for Valve, its four-year efforts ended up paying off. Once the item store was introduced, revenues from item sales alone were four times larger than revenues from sales of TF2 itself, and after the free-to-play transition was finished, overall revenue was up 12 times higher than monthly TF2 sales were. "This is just the beginning of taking the lessons we’ve learned from TF2 and applying them to Steam itself," Ludwig said, "It was risky, everything could have gone horribly wrong, but we felt it was worth the risk to try the new business model."

Source: GamaSutra

Recently there’s been chatter that Valve — the company behind the massively popular gaming service Steam — has been considering getting into the hardware business. Specifically, there have been rumors that the company has been toying with the idea of creating a proper set-top console which could potentially pose a threat to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell even recently told Penny Arcade: “Well, if we have to sell hardware we will.”

At a glance that would simply be interesting fodder for a gaming forum debate, but we’ve uncovered information that suggests that not only has Valve been secretly working on gaming hardware for the living room, but that the company is actively pursuing a strategy which would place Steam at the center of an open gaming universe that mirrors what Google has done with Android. Backing up that concept, in the same interview we quote above, Newell says that Valve doesn’t really want to do hardware on its own, stating, “We’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do [hardware]. We think it’s important enough that if that’s what we end up having to do, then that’s what we end up having to do.”

That jibes pretty well with this rumored arrangement.

According to sources, the company has been working on a hardware spec and associated software which would make up the backbone of a “Steam Box.” The actual devices may be made by a variety of partners, and the software would be readily available to any company that wants to get in the game.

Adding fuel to that fire is a rumor that the Alienware X51 may have been designed with an early spec of the system in mind, and will be retroactively upgradable to the software.

Apparently meetings were held during CES to demo a hand-built version of the device to potential partners. We’re told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA’s Origin) to be loaded up.

Part of the goal of establishing a baseline for hardware, we’re told, is that it will give developers a clear lifecycle for their products, with changes possibly coming every three to four years. Additionally, there won’t be a required devkit, and there will be no licensing fees to create software for the platform.

We’re hearing that a wide variety of USB peripherals will be compatible with the boxes, though it will likely ship with a proprietary controller. It’s possible that the controller will even allow for swappable components, meaning that it can be reconfigured depending on the type of game you’re playing. Think that sounds odd? Well Valve filed a patent for such a device last year.

Additionally, we’re told that the kind of biometrics Valve uses in game testing will somehow be incorporated into these devices. Sources of ours say that the realtime biometric feedback in games will be a sea-change for users. To put it more succinctly, the sentiment we’ve heard is: “You won’t ever look back.” These biometric devices could come in the form of a bracelet, or be part of the standard controller.

The consoles will also take advantage of Steam’s “Big Picture” mode, a feature Valve touted last year at GDC, but has yet to release to the public. According to the company’s press release in 2011 “With big picture mode, gaming opportunities for Steam partners and customers become possible via PCs and Macs on any TV or computer display in the house.”

The most interesting piece of this puzzle may be related to that statement. According to sources, the Steam Box isn’t intended to just clash with current gaming consoles. Rather, Valve wants to take Apple and its forthcoming new Apple TV products head-on. Newell has clear questions about Apple’s strategy, telling the The Seattle Times “On the platform side, it’s sort of ominous that the world seems to be moving away from open platforms,” adding that “They build a shiny sparkling thing that attracts users and then they control people’s access to those things.”

The Steam Box could be unveiled at GDC, though we’re also hearing that the company may wait until E3 this year to show off what it’s been working on.

One thing is for sure, however: if these rumors turn out to be correct, there could be a whole new kind of battle for control of your living room happening in the near future. Of course, much of this is pieced together from a variety of sources, and there could be moving parts which we can’t see. Some of this information could change.

We’ve reached out to Valve for comment, and will update the post with any new information we receive.

Source: The Verge

Source: Steam Forums

See the pics here.

This Saturday the 28,000 members of this Steam group are planning to play Half-Life 2 together.

The group hopes that the massive play session will shoot Half-Life 2 up the Steam most-played list and let Valve know how many people are still waiting for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Valve certainly know this already, and probably receive dozens of emails but the group hopes to deliver the message in a more appreciative way.

“Instead of focusing efforts in a negative and disrespectful way, we have decided to gain Valve’s attention by delivering a basic message: Your oldest and longest running fanbase would like better communication,” they say on the Steam group page.

Event is set to kick off at 7PM GMT / 11AM PST this Saturday.